Before Saturday Night Live‘s first-ever break out star looked into the camera and announced that he was Chevy Chase and we were not, Lorne Michaels had pictured someone else behind the “Weekend Update” desk: himself.
The SNL creator had already experimented with a comparable fake-news format on the CBC series The Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour, which he created with comedy partner Hart Pomerantz in 1971. When he began building NBC’s Saturday Night four years later, he planned to carry the idea over and serve as the segment’s anchor.
As Michaels later explained, he reconsidered when he realized that producing the show would require him to cut other writers’ material while protecting his own.
Instead, he handed the desk to Chase, then technically a writer rather than a cast member, and changed the course of television history.
Five decades later, “Weekend Update” is the show’s longest-running recurring segment. It has survived changes in title, format, network leadership and more than two dozen regular anchors. It has also become one of the show’s most powerful star-making machines.
Anchors like Chase, Dennis Miller, Norm Macdonald, Tina Fey, Jimmy Fallon, Amy Poehler, Seth Meyers, and Colin Jost & Michael Che have all used the desk to build a direct relationship with viewers that ordinary sketch comedy rarely permits.
That makes every change of anchor one of the most consequential choices the show can make. It also makes the people who nearly got the job irresistible subjects for an alternate history of SNL.
1985: Weekend Update with… Jon Lovitz?
It would be a full ten years after Chevy Chase’s landmark season behind SNL’s fake news desk before the segment’s next signature star would emerge. That’s not to take anything away from Jane Curtin, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Charles Rocket, Brad Hall, Christopher Guest, and the parade of guest anchors who also helmed the segment amid its five-year run as a rebranded “Saturday Night News” during SNL’s Dick Ebersol years.
When Lorne Michaels returned to the show in 1985 for what would later be dubbed “the weird year,” he reportedly first considered Jon Lovitz for the role before hiring Dennis Miller for the express purpose of anchoring the show’s news segment, the first time the show’s “Weekend Update” anchor was not also one of the show’s regular sketch performers.
The role went to Kevin Nealon after Miller left SNL in 1991 to host his own late-night talk show, but it was upon Nealon’s departure in 1994 that the first true paper trail of would-be hosts emerges.
Al Franken is known to have actively pursued the job at this point, and longtime SNL scribe Jim Downey had said that Bill Maher had strong industry backing. Norm Macdonald emerged late and won the chair.
There are other near misses from those years, including Tim Kazurinsky reportedly turning down the desk in 1984 and Marc Maron being summoned for an awkward meeting while Macdonald still had the job in Season 22. After Macdonald was famously pushed out by then-NBC president Don Ohmeyer, Colin Quinn was hasily promoted from within the cast to replace him.
2000: Replacing Colin Quinn
The choice of Jimmy Fallon and Tina Fey now feels like a defining move for the show. In the summer of 2000, though, it was far from inevitable. Fey was SNL‘s head writer and had only recently begun appearing on camera, while Fallon was still a relative newbie to the show, having just completed just his second season in the cast.
Still, their pairing ended up beating out several other writers, established stand-ups, and another ill-fated duo drawn from the cast.
Kevin Brennan
Standup comic-turned-podcaster Kevin Brennan (he created and hosts the Misery Loves Company podcast) first joined SNL as a writer for Season 25 after initially auditioning for the cast. Near the end of that season, he appeared twice on “Weekend Update,” delivering stand-up-style commentaries about the presidential race. Looking back, “those appearances now play like live auditions for the desk he was known to be pursuing.
A Brennan-led “Update” likely would have remained closer to the harder-edged club-comic energy of the Norm Macdonald and Colin Quinn years. He was comfortable delivering jokes under his own name and did not need a character as a buffer. After losing the role to Fallon and Fey, Brennan left the show.
Ana Gasteyer and Chris Parnell
Ana Gasteyer and Chris Parnell screen-tested as a team, giving Michaels an alternative team to Fallon and Fey. Both were precise, technically gifted performers who could make absurd material sound completely reasonable.
That quality might have produced a wonderfully strange newscast, with Gasteyer’s command and Parnell’s unflappable deadpan making even the most ridiculous headline feel official. But the cost to the show writ large would have been significant. Gasteyer and Parnell were two of SNL‘s most versatile sketch players, and taking on “Update” tends to reduce a player’s availability elsewhere. “
Parnell went on to become one of the desk’s favorite recurring visitors through his raps and character pieces. In this alternate universe, the show gains a strong anchor team but loses some of the flexibility that made both performers so valuable.
Jake Johannsen
Jake Johannsen would have been an intriguing outside choice. A seasoned comic who made dozens of appearances on David Letterman‘s shows, his stand-up mixed intelligent observations with a nervous, slightly surreal delivery. His “Update” might have felt less like a traditional newscast and more like an extended Letterman desk piece.
Jeff Ross
The Roastmaster General as “Weekend Update” anchor? It nearly happened.
In his book, I Only Roast the Ones I Love, Jeff Ross recalls that his manager told him he had landed the position. Network executives congratulated him, and Will Ferrell did the same when they crossed paths. When Ross finally met with Michaels, however, he learned that the producer was under pressure to promote from within and had settled on pairing Fallon with Fey.
2004: Replacing Jimmy Fallon
When Fallon left after Season 29, SNL preserved the two-anchor format. Fey remained in place while Amy Poehler moved into Fallon’s chair, creating the first (and to date only) all-woman anchor team in the segment’s history. But despite a long history performing together that predated SNL, their “Weekend Update” pairing was not preordained.
Jason Sudeikis
Jason Sudeikis was still an SNL writer when he auditioned with Fey in 2024. He had made occasional on-camera appearances, but he would not officially join the cast until the following spring. Even then, the qualities that later made him such an effective sketch performer were visible: confidence, warmth and a Phil Hartman-like ability to play a straight man without disappearing.
A Fey-Sudeikis desk might have resembled a classic local newscast with two extremely confident anchors. The larger question is what the job would have taken away. If he had been locked behind the desk, SNL might never have discovered a generational utility player who helped stabilize a golden-era cast.
Seth Meyers
By 2004, Seth Meyers had spent three seasons trying to find his ideal place in a cast crowded with exceptional sketch performers. “Weekend Update” would eventually become his place, but not yet. He auditioned to sit beside Fey in 2004 and lost to Poehler, a decision he has since acknowledged made perfect sense.
Meyers ultimately got the anchor job in 2006, but he’d have to fight for it.
2006: Replacing Tina Fey
When Fey departed SNL for 30 Rock, the competition to sit beside Poehler was intense. Meyers has recalled that roughly five to seven people auditioned, most with career-defining prospects on the line.
Meyers had more at stake than most. His cast contract had expired, and the show wanted him to sign a deal that would make him head writer even if he lost “Update” and disappeared from the cast. He refused to sign until the anchor decision was made, effectively gambling his future at the show on the belief that the desk was where he belonged.
In the end, he won the job and stayed there for the next seven and a half years, but the other possibilities could have sent the show in radically different directions.
Charlie Grandy
Charlie Grandy was not a familiar face to viewers, but he knew the segment as well as anyone. He wrote for SNL from 2001 to 2008 and became a producer on “Weekend Update,” later building a career that included The Office, The Mindy Project, and Velma.
Choosing Grandy would have followed the same basic instinct that elevated Fey and later Colin Jost: putting a trusted writer on camera. A Poehler-Grandy desk might have made Poehler the explosive performer and Grandy the stabilizing editorial voice. It also might have launched an entirely different on-camera career for someone who instead became most influential behind the scenes.
Horatio Sanz
Horatio Sanz was the only 2006 candidate who had actuallyy performed the job on the air, having filled in beside Poehler for the first two episodes of Season 31 while Fey was on maternity leave. His loose, giggly energy produced a desk that felt very different from the typical Poehler-Fey broadcast.
By the end of the following summer, SNL was reducing its budget and Sanz was not brought back. Getting “Update” would have done more than give him a new assignment, it would have saved his place on the show.
Jason Sudeikis
The 2006 audition process gave Sudeikis a second path to the desk. By then he’d been on the show’s cast for a year, and his ease on camera made him an even more obvious candidate, but it was not to be.
Kenan Thompson
By 2006, Kenan Thompson was already a veteran television performer, but he was only entering his fourth season at SNL.
Had he gotten the job, Thompson would have become the show’s first Black anchor. His timing and ability to react without stealing focus might have made him an exceptional host for correspondent pieces. But that same alternate universe might have prevented him from having the bandwidth to develop the collection of talk-show hosts, game-show emcees, politicians and baffled authority figures that would come to define modern SNL.
2014: Replacing Cecily Strong
SNL’s strangest “Weekend Update” audition process may have been the one that created the current desk.
In anticipation of Seth Meyers leaving midseason to take over NBC’s Late Night, Cecily Strong joined Meyers for the start of Season 39. When Meyers left in February 2014 , head writer Colin Jost replaced him and finished the season with Strong. Then, over the summer, Michaels reopened the process, and Jost was told he would have to audition for the job he already held.
In his memoir, A Very Punchable Face, Jost recalls the steep competition he faced that summer before he was brought back, this time alongside Michael Che, whom Michaels hired away from The Daily Show, which he had just joined as a junior correspondent in June.
Vanessa Bayer
Vanessa Bayer usually delivers her off-kilter brand of comedy with a bright smile. At the desk, that could have produced a deceptively sunny “Update,” with unsettling or cutting punchlines delivered in the same cheerful tone she brought to Jacob the Bar Mitzvah Boy. She also had proven chemistry with Jost and the ability to commit fully to awkward rhythms.
Anthony Jeselnik
The show’s one outside candidate for “Update” anchor in 2014, Anthony Jeselnik was a stand-up with a meticulously constructed stage persona. A solo Jeselnik “Update” might have been the closest the show has come yet to recreating the danger of the Norm Macdonald years. That might have made it appointment television, but it also could have become isolated from the rest of the show as Jeselnik’s persona is built to dominate a room, something that would be unfamiliar to the modern version of the show.
Leslie Jones
Leslie Jones had joined the writing staff earlier in 2014 and quickly began appearing on “Update” as a heightened version of herself. Her commentaries eventually developed a memorable comic relationship with Jost, leading to Jones openly flirting with him while he attempted to maintain his composure.
Making Jones an anchor could have placed that unpredictable energy at the center of every edition. A Jost-Jones desk might have turned their later flirtation into the segment’s defining relationship, with Jost as the polished newsreader and Jones as the force constantly blowing up the format. She also would have become the first Black woman to anchor “Weekend Update.” Jones instead joined the cast that fall.
Chris Kelly
Like Grandy in 2006, Chris Kelly represented the possibility of turning an accomplished backstage voice into an on-camera one. He later became one of the show’s head writers alongside Sarah Schneider and co-created The Other Two.
Sasheer Zamata
Sasheer Zamata was still new to SNL, having joined midway through Season 39 after a very public casting search for a Black woman. Her calm, grounded delivery might have contrasted effectively with Jost, and her own later appearances at the desk showed an ability to discuss race and gender issues without sacrificing the jokes.
Like Jones, selecting Zamata would have made her the first Black woman to anchor the segment and instantly given her a defined role on a show that struggled to utilize her talents.
Generational Decisions:
Like any general manager of a professional sports team, making tough decisions defines your legacy. Lorne Michaels, who still has that George Steinbrenner-feel for difficult decision-making at 81 years old, has potentially made no more consequential choices than deciding who will sit behind that famous desk in Studio 8H.
While “Weekend Update” may be fixed to homebase on Saturday nights, it has been a fork in the road for careers that have defined comedy over the last half-century. Every person who sits behind the desk changes the segment, and everyone who doesn’t has been sent towards another version of their career. Somewhere in the SNL multiverse, Jeff Ross is roasting early 2000s headlines, Leslie Jones is planting a kiss on Colin Jost every week, Kenan Thompson is telling America “Goodnight and have a pleasant tomorrow,” or Michaels himself is still sitting behind the desk 50+ years later.
All indications are that Colin Jost and Michael Che are headed toward a record 13th season at the “Update” desk this September, leaving open the question of whether Michaels has one last generational decision ahead of him—and who might be the chosen ones to sit behind the iconic desk next. Only time will tell.
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